Why effective client communication is important

You don’t need us to tell you that nurturing your client relationships is essential to the survival and growth of your accountancy practice. However, the 2020 lockdowns changed many things for good, including how you can communicate with clients and how often they expect you to update them on the latest developments. Here are the reasons you need effective client communication.

New ways of staying connected

Most accountants were used to having face-to-face meetings with their clients regularly. When the 2020 lockdowns began, everything changed.

Seeing clients in person was no longer possible, but they expected more client communication than ever because of the degree of uncertainty they had to deal with daily.
Fortunately, technology allows you to effectively communicate with video calls with all your clients.

The added advantage is that you no longer have to spend hours on the road to go to your client’s offices, so making the most of the tech available will allow you to manage client communications from different locations and offer the best client experience.

However, it is important to remember that you still need to schedule these appointments regularly. During uncertain times, you have to reassure your clients and make sure they know you are there for them, offering them advice and guidance when needed.

Regular updates

Other popular approaches include sending newsletters and creating WhatsApp groups for clients. This responds to the need of the clients to stay informed about all the government announcements and new measures that will impact their business.

Besides, you can do short video updates for your website and social media profiles or even fortnightly webinars for clients who are interested.

Communication and advising clients about the best course of action is as important as ever, so make sure you use all the resources available to stay connected with your clients regularly.

Need support with effective client communication?

If you can’t keep up with all the work you have and you find you don’t have enough time to dedicate to speak with your clients, training more employees to handle direct calls with them might be a good short-term solution.

Otherwise, it might be time to recruit new employees. Even if you prefer to keep on working from home, you can train employees easily using video calls and tools that help you and your new employees stay organised during the whole process.

For instance, Uku makes hiring new people easy for you and for your new employees by streamlining the onboarding process.

You can create and assign tasks to your new employees, and whenever they have a question, they can add a comment to the task, allowing you to review all the commented tasks later and answer all their questions.

Illustration by Icons8